'What is Gay Art?' in Provincetown

Saturday

Sep 21, 2013 at 12:01 AMSep 21, 2013 at 9:11 PM

Hunter O’Hanian, former director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (1997-2006) and current director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, is presenting a slide talk on “What is Gay Art?” from 12:30 to 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 22, at Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St. The talk is part of the “10 Days of Art: Hidden Treasures” festival, which runs through Sept. 22.

Rob Phelps

We all know sexy art when we see it.

From Caravaggio’s angelic rent boys or Botticelli’s curvaceous Venus on the half shell, to the feminist eroticism of Anita Steckel or the pistils and stamens of Robert Mapplethorpe’s audacious calla lilies — we get it.

But what do we mean by the term “gay art?”

Can an object, which only truly comes alive in the eyes of its creator and beholder, even have sexuality?

Hunter O’Hanian, director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown from 1997 to 2006, would argue yes, and as current director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, he’s in the position to speak on the subject with authority.

And speak about it O’Hanian will — with a slideshow to prove his case — in his talk “What is Gay Art?” from 12:30 to 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 22, at Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St. The talk is part of the “10 Days of Art: Hidden Treasures” festival, organized by Gallery Ehva owner Ewa Nogiec and co-sponsored by the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies. “10 Days of Art,” which runs through Sept. 22, is currently transforming the large auditorium in Town Hall with art installations, music and other live performances, talks like O’Hanian’s and much more. For details go to 10daysofart.org.

O’Hanian’s question — what is gay art and is there even such a thing? — gets asked a lot in the art world, O’Hanian says. But what does it mean? Is the art gay because the artist is gay? Or just because it’s homoerotic? Here, O’Hanian would tend to argue no to both.

“Gay art,” O’Hanian neatly defines, “is that which speaks to the LBGTQ community. It’s work that speaks to the experiences” of any or all of the members of these groups: lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, transgenders and those simply questioning, he says. “In this sense, the whole topic of gay art is a subject that could be comparable to landscape or still life.”

O’Hanian says he’ll go through about 20 to 30 works by artists most people will recognize and ask a broad range of questions such as: is there a gay sensibility to the pieces? What is the role of eroticism in the human form? How have men, women and transgenders dealt with these issues differently?

“We’ll look at things like coding, where gay artists try to reference sexual orientation in their work,” he says of the practice perhaps most popular in the early 20th century before folks were free to speak openly about the subject. Gay art, he says, wasn’t really thought of as a concept until the post-Stonewall part of the sexual revolution and AIDS eras, when gay movements took on prominence in public discourse.

From masochism of saints to sensuality in the bathtub, “gay art” clearly possesses the potential to be sexy. But it’s important, O’Hanian stresses, to understand that the concept is as wide open as anything that touches on same-sex issues, including their darker or political aspects, such as art’s connections to AIDS and art’s role in the fight against that epidemic. In fact, says O’Hanian, the museum that he currently directs started when gay men began dying and friends and family members didn’t know what to do with their belongings. The Lohman collection began, he says, as an accumulation of much of the works collected and sometimes created by those who died of AIDS. Since then it’s grown exponentially to amass tens of thousands of pieces, its sources broadening as rapidly as the ways we look at art in this manner.

O’Hanian says for his Sunday talk he’ll concentrate on more contemporary artists than the classics largely because it’s tough to hone down the talk to an hour and a half. So while he might reference Michelangelo or Caravaggio, he’ll be showing and exploring the works of the photographer Berenice Abbott and the illustrator Tom of Finland. He also mentions Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon, Paul Cadmus, Robert Rauschenberg and George Platt Lyons. He says along with the saucier works by the old masters he’ll tend not to show the more obvious contemporary choices (Andy Warhol, Keith Herring) and will include works by at least two artists with strong Provincetown connections, Marsden Hartley and Charles DeMuth.

Ultimately, it’s a tough choice and O’Hanian suggests at the end of the day and right up until the start of his talk he won’t completely rule out anyone or anything. Gay art turns out to not only exist but to be a very big subject.

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